Robin Hardy Online

The Imagined God--and the Real

"I suspect that in our pride we would prefer to have an external God, i.e., one who makes unreasonable demands on us and fails to keep what seems to be the one elementary rule for God—that if we lead good lives, we shall (by right) be protected from all the painful and nasty things that happen to other people. It is an easy step from this to atheism. God having plainly failed and we having plainly outgrown him, then we must fall back on ourselves.

"Yes, we must, but we do not thereby escape our dealings with God, for it is here in ourselves, that he will, given half a chance, come to live and start putting our house in order! A little bit of us wants this, and a big babyish part of us does not: it refuses to grow up. We would rather be men with a grievance against an imaginary God than have any truck with the real, living God, who, if once we allowed him in, might get up to all sorts of things.

"Yes, indeed he might, but we are both wrong and foolish to be afraid. For one thing, we cannot in the long run win any battle against the unceasing pressure of God's love, and for another, he who appears to be our enemy is not merely our friend but Someone who is in closest harmony with our deepest self. 'We are not,' said Von Hugel, 'to think of the Holy Spirit and the human spirit, God and the soul, as two separate entities. God's Spirit works in closest association with ours.' And in any case, although God may hurt us, he will never harm us, since his nature is love of the highest kind."

J.B. Phillips, Ring of Truth (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967), 44-45. Phillips covers this topic in greater depth in Your God Is Too Small.